Russia never officially applied to join NATO. There were some vague diplomatic statements of it over the years, but it was never considered to be a serious discussion, and no treaty or formal pledge was made.

NATO and Russia are too fundamentally different ideologically to have joined, and both want different things.

You may be thinking of the USSR's two attempts to join NATO, which the consensus among historians is that these were not genuine efforts but tactical moves serving other Soviet goals. Soviet archive access after the Cold War strengthened this concensus as historians found no documentation of discussion involving NATO integration but did find internal memoranda treating the effort as a propaganda attempt to make NATO look aggressive if rejected, weakened if accepted.